I'm 24. and I still want to become a grandmaster)

LoOLOoooOLooOoOooOL. You will learn much more if you quit CP and start doing the stuff that a professional programmer does.

I am 20 , and will at least become Orange before completing my graduation :)

The thing is, why do you want to be in division 1? Is it just for a personal sense of achievement? Or you want to use it as "trump card" to show your peers/future employers that you are a pretty darn good programmer? If your aim is the latter, don't waste your time because no one cares. If you are doing it for the former, then I wish you all the best.

I'm ~1.5 years older than my crush

I'm 18 and I believe that I can reach violet before I become 19

I am 16 and i hope that in the near future i will get to div1.

I was always wondering, there are people older than 24-25 years old who practice regularly in competitive programming?

I am 26 and I have faced the truth a few years ago. My brain is structurally different from the brains of the red guys and I won't be like them no matter how much problems I solve. I have acquired peace of mind since that time and compete for my pleasure and entertainment =)

I'm 19 and I believe that I am too stupid to become red.

Hello,

I was a contestant long ago and now I am just a coach of a small team. I found out that I had one student who finished his medical studies, practiced and later realized that he is meant for solving problems. So he joined back in university in Computer Science and now solves problem regularly. He is 10-12 years older than me but his level of motivation is as fresh as a new-comer. His dedication is proving to be right, as he is progressing exponentially.

My personal opinion is that age is just a number if it comes to LEARNING and PROGRAMMING.

Happy coding.

I'm 15.

While there's somebody about 13 but red .

There's a saying "You are not able to defeat him if he's younger but more powerful" :)

I'm 25; I stopped doing any work on developing (or at least maintaining) my CP skills after ICPC WF 2017 — I went for a full time job instead and started learning software development and programming, and now I'm devoting my free time to other random stuff.

I'm still participating in various competitions from time to time, simply because it is a fun and interesting thing to do, and I enjoy spending some of my time this way.

Answering your question about older contestants — among people currently having rating 3000+ at CF I see at least 3 guys which are older than 30. However, I have no idea if they practice regularly nowadays :)

I am 19 and I think red EZ

I'm 24,6. I am too old to reach to the red)

I'm 16, and I really think that coaching is important in CP. I used to train alone with only OJ and CF, and stayed at pupil. But after I went to a camp and got some apropriate coaching, I suddnely rised up to Expert. take a look at my abnormal graph XD

Actually the reason why I started CF was because of the editorials and this comment section. Thanks to many people who read my questions after a contest, I think I learned much

I'm 24 years and a half. Started problem solving when I was 20 years old.

I'm 19, and started competitive programming around 2 years ago after failing horribly in IMO. This year I've taken every div1 CF that I possibly could (I have missed two I think, both due to ICPC world finals). My goal is to become red before my account is 2 years old! (I still have 3 months left)

I am 22 and I just started half a year ago. My rating is now ~2300.

Well, I actually received some training at middle school, but I totally gave up at grade 10. For 6 years I'd never learned anything or wrote any program relevant to CP. In the university my major was electronic engineering and I was interested in machine learning, so I did coding a lot, but it had never involved any sophisicated algorithms.

I am 19 years old (almost 20), in my third year of university. I started coding around 2 years ago. My goal is to reach 2500 before I graduate! I try to take part in all well-known contests (and ofcourse upsolve problems) to be a step closer to my goal :)

I'm 16, started learning CP about 1 year ago. I am learning to compete in national olympiad and to become red in the future :)

I am 21 and a math final year student, started learning programming languages and CP two years ago since some red coder friend invited me. No coaching and not a team member. Joining CP makes fun and keeps my brain get simulated in summer vacation. Solving easy equations fast brings me to ~1900.

Unfortunately, I have no time for going further. By next week I will fail the team formation test the third time and probably leave this community.

i am almost 20 now and in 3rd year of my engineering.I was more involved in reducing the processing time of a neural network using parallel processing for the ETCC.now from past ~5 months i have been doing cp.

im 20,1 (second year of univ)and i believe color does matters.... but i think failing and learning something from it is most important ;i always try to change color of solved contests green(upsolving till last problem) and learn and learn and learn :D

I'm 21 years old (4^th year Engineering student)

I started training alone 3 years ago when one of my friends told me about ACM & IEEE Xtreme

I am also feeling very sad.My age is 23.I started cp around 4 years ago.Still i am in division 2 :( I want to be purple in between next 2 or 3 contests but don't know what will happen.

I'm 15, and I started CP 2 months ago. I want to be CM before the USACO season starts but that's going to be pretty difficult. I will be happy if I can be expert :)

23 years 0 months 2 days O_o. I started Competitive Programming just few months before 22. I think here age doesn't matter. It's just my personal opinion. Still now I'm not even a specialist. But believe me, I'm not worried about my age! At this moment my only concern is, how much more time the codeforces queue will last!

32 years old, started a year ago. From my rank you can see I still suck :-), but slowly getting better. I'm a software developer/architect and working on software development professionally for more than 15 years, but cp is much different. I started cp as part of preparation for interviews, but then continued since its fun. How far I will push it I cannot say, but I also strive to become grandmaster :-)

But Is It Rated?

I'm 20 years old. You can see my target in my handle name. I think CP is a part of my life that I can not living without. Anyone here and friend and do gym with me?

I'm 20, in my final year of Engineering. Started CP after doing terrible (last place) at a competition during tech-fest of some college. I want to be a candidate master within this month and a master by the time I complete graduation! :)

I'm 14. i start to code 8 months ago. I will try hard to reach master in 2018 and participate in IOI. pray for me, please.

I'm almost 16 and my goal is to reach nutella and make a cf blogpost with a picture of me eating nutella.

I'm 35, I always loved math, won a contest when I was a kid, but never programmed until the age of 22 and never knew CP existed before about 2 years ago.

I spent a lot of time on Project Euler, and as I got a new job with more programming, I started getting interested in Python.

One night, I stumbled upon Google Code Jam. It seemed so much fun to me, but I didn't know any of the programming structures.

And then I found this great community: at first, I found the problems extremely difficult, the time limits ridiculously small. I didn't understand why my python solution always got TLE. I got to learn again c++ thanks to it, and to learn at my old age how to code faster (2 hours to solve 1 problem seemed a good timing before I came here)

I'm roughly the same age as Petr, and I always considered myself as very gifted in math, and being on this site has been the most humbling experience ever. When I see what he did as a teenager, and what everyone on this site achieves (not only talking about div1), I'm truly impressed.

As a very old guy on this website, make no mistake : you have the time fall in a coma, not do anything until you're 30, and still have a lot of time to be great in programming and in other things in life.

Also, behind the world of competitive programming or landing in a Tier 1 tech company there is a whole world full of people that need problems solved efficiently, and people able to formulate these problems. Having practised CP will help you in interviews and interaction way beyond "landing your first graduate job".

Anyway, even with my awful learning rate, it's still profitable for me to do a few hours of CP per week, so there is no question for anyone younger (or anyone older for that matter).

Never stop CP-ing it's the best. Having this kind of challenge and knowledge base and community around at your age is something priceless.

There are not that many activities where half of the best people in the world are under 20 and so accessible. If this activity is something that is actually valued in the real world beyond competition (at least more valued than esport), there is no question.

So, do it to have fun, for your career (even at 35 it's still useful, after all Google interviewed me just because I was top 3000 at GCJ), to progress in programming but also in math and in general problem solving. No need to be less than 20 for that.

I hope I'll still be here getting outsmarted by kids for a long time.

I'm 16 years old , I'm going to go to IOI2019. :D (In my view my CF rating will grow before IOI2019 xD)

I'm 16 years old.The road of my programming contesets is just started. I'm not good at programming now and my rating is lower than 1500. However,I am determined to try out my best. I will study harder and practice more regularly in the following days. I believe there will be one day I got success and achievements by my own.

/

I'm 16 and I've just become Expert. I think the age is not problem, and the way you keep going will bring you success. Good luck!

I'm 16 and I want to be yellow =)

I'm 25

I'm 23 now. I was first exposed to programming contests when I was 14. It's been pretty interesting to see how my relationship with contests has changed over the years.

From 14-19 I would compete in the "big contests" but never took the time to solve problems otherwise. At the time the "big contests" for me were USACO (American high school olympiads) and ICPC. As you might imagine, I wasn't that good and didn't progress very quickly since I didn't invest in any proper training. I think a big part of the issue is that I overvalued innate talent. I didn't understand how necessary it was to solve problems on your own and I didn't have an idea of how fruitful that could be.

From 20-21 I trained pretty hard with the aim of performing well in ICPC. Our college ICPC team would have 5-hour practices once or twice a week to do old contests. After those I would go home and upsolve problems that we didn't finish. I also started to compete in Codeforces and Topcoder whenever they had rounds and I would upsolve those problems afterward as well. It paid off both in terms of personal improvement and in advancing to the ICPC World Finals during my senior year in 2016. I also met several of my best friends from college through the ICPC community.

After I graduated, I took a job at a tech startup and for a couple of years I stopped spending much time on competitive programming. In the first year, I would do Codeforces occasionally but otherwise I was focused on work, other hobbies, and on my social development. In the second year, I didn't compete anywhere apart from the annual Code Jam and Hackercup rounds.

Recently, I returned to programming contests. I'm competing on Codeforces whenever there's a contest and I started participating in Atcoder rounds as well. I'm back for the simple joy of solving beautiful problems and implementing their solutions. As I grow older, it feels more necessary to have something that centers me and is always there for me regardless of how other things in life change. That thing seems to be programming contests.

I've also realized more and more how important programming contests have been for my personal development. It's hard to overstate the value of learning something in an environment with precise and immediate feedback. You learn to be really honest with yourself about your strengths and weakness. You learn to critically evaluate your behavioral tendencies both in the contest environment and in day-to-day life. You learn to approach things in a discplined way and you learn how to perform under pressure.

Looking back on things, I'm really glad that this community exists. Looking forward, I'm excited for many more years to come of training, competing, and being a part of this community.

Hello I am 20 and in my 3rd year. I wish to become blue before next month ends. I am trying hard(missing classes) for it to happen. Wish me good luck!
Happy coding :)